Executed by Saddam Hussein: the death of Observer reporter Farzad Bazoft, 20 years on

Donald Trelford was editor of the Observer when his reporter was arrested in Iraq, falsely accused of spying and hanged on 15 March 1990. He remembers a friend and colleague whose death served as a warning to the world about Saddam Hussein

Five box files containing press cuttings, letters and other papers about Farzad Bazoft have followed me around the world for the last 20 years, a perpetual reminder of my most harrowing time on the Observer. Going through them again and reliving that terrible period has been a painful but enlightening experience.

Farzad was 31 when he was executed in Baghdad. He had been born in Iran and came to England in 1975, at the age of 16, to complete his education. After the Khomeini revolution in 1979, he stayed on. He became a freelance journalist and throughout the 1980s he fed the Observer and other media, including the BBC World Service, with items about the Iran-Iraq war.

He was an attractive and rather exotic figure with an Omar Sharif moustache. Although he was never on the Observer's staff, or even on a retainer, he was welcomed in the office and allowed to use a desk and a telephone. Part of his attraction was his undisguised ambition to be a famous journalist like the Washington Post's Watergate sleuths, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He carried around with him a copy of John Pilger's book, Heroes. His favourite film was TheKilling Fields, about foreign correspondents in Cambodia. He fought hard for a by-line on his contributions. This naive and romantic side of his nature was to have tragic consequences.

His opposition to the Khomeini regime made him accepted in Iraq, and he was invited there five times and saw the front line of the war from their side. A sixth, ultimately fatal invitation came in September 1989, when he was offered the chance to cover elections in Kurdistan. On the day his press party arrived in Baghdad, the Independent led with a story about a massive explosion at a military complex that had supposedly killed 700 people. There were suspicions that it might have been caused by experiments with chemical or nuclear weapons.

An ITN crew went to look but were sent away and their film confiscated. Farzad met the deputy foreign minister, Nizam Hamdoun, and asked to visit the site. He also sounded out contacts at the information ministry about taking him there. Then, sensing that this might be the scoop of a lifetime, he enlisted the help of Daphne Parish, a British nurse he had met on a previous visit, to drive him to Al Hillah, 40 miles south of Baghdad. She agreed on condition that there would be "no fence-jumping or James Bond stuff". They went on successive days to take photographs and collect soil samples, though they always stayed on public roads.

When Farzad returned to Baghdad, he told the other journalists what he had been doing and showed them what he had found. Some of them were nervous on his behalf and urged him to leave the country. He was waiting for an Iraq Airways flight to London, just before midnight on 15 September, when he was picked up at Baghdad airport and taken for interrogation by Saddam Hussein's notorious Mukhabarat secret police.

He was held in solitary confinement for six weeks while this newspaper, the Foreign Office, the European Commission and many journalist organisations around the world campaigned for his release. Eventually, on 1 November, the Iraqis issued a tape showing him "confessing" to being a spy for Israel. Earlier the Iraqis had claimed he was spying for Britain. When Farzad's Observer colleagues watched the tape, we were shocked by his appearance. He had lost much weight and seemed to be exhausted, drugged or suffering from the effects of torture, or possibly all of these. His eyes were those of a sick and frightened man.

Worldwide appeals continued for his release, or at least a fair trial. I saw Iraq's ambassador in London twice. I was refused permission to attend his trial, as was the British QC we appointed to defend him. His defence lawyer in Baghdad was given one day's notice of the trial. It was conducted in Arabic, a language Farzad didn't know. Sworn statements by the Observer and his press colleagues on the trip were not admitted. On 26 November the Revolutionary Court sentenced him to be hanged, with no right of appeal, and Mrs Parish was given 15 years' hard labour (she was eventually released and returned to Britain after 10 months).

There was a worldwide media outcry at their sentences. Mrs Thatcher, the prime minister, spoke out strongly. The foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, offered to go to Baghdad, but he was told he wouldn't be welcome. The omens were not good. Eventually, on 15 March, the British consul-general in Baghdad, Robin Kealy, was summoned to Abu Ghraib prison and informed that Farzad would be hanged in one hour, only to discover that the prisoner had not been told. He had to break the news, which Farzad bore with dignity. He left letters for his family and friends and apologised to Mrs Parish "for having involved her". His final words were: "I was just a journalist going after a scoop."

Even amid this nightmare there were some poignant moments. Those who were there will always remember the prayers conducted around the Observer's news desk by Canon John Oates, Rector of St Bride's, the Fleet Street church, on the morning of Farzad's death. His burial in Highgate Cemetery, close to the grave of Karl Marx, was profoundly affecting. His desk in the office became a shrine, his picture surrounded by flowers and messages. Readers sent hundreds of sympathetic letters, some including poems or money. The Observer, working through the Foreign Office, tried hard to arrange for Farzad's body to be returned to his parents in England. Eventually, with no warning, the coffin arrived late at night at Heathrow airport, accompanied by a chilling message from an Iraqi official: "Mrs Thatcher wanted him. We've sent him in a box." The Daily Express ran a disgraceful front page, claiming that the absence of Observer representatives at the airport was proof that the newspaper, for all its public rhetoric, didn't care about its dead colleague.

Even now, two decades on, it is hard to contain one's anger – not just at the insane barbarity of Saddam, but at some Tory MPs and the parts of the British press that tried to pin the blame for his murder on poor Farzad himself, on the Observer and especially on me. Sifting through the massive coverage, it is clear that some journalists come out well from the affair, notably Paul Foot, Hugo Young, John Pilger and Keith Waterhouse. Others appeared to be guilty, to use Foot's phrase, of "vicious humbug and hypocrisy".

In that category fall Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who accused me in the Sunday Telegraph of "sending him to the slaughterhouse", even though I didn't send Farzad to Iraq – he was a freelance responding to an official invitation – and didn't know he was in Iraq until he was arrested; Sir John Junor in the Mail on Sunday ("Is Mr Trelford himself a holy innocent?"); Lord (Woodrow) Wyatt, who told his News of the World readers that Britain should "start maximising trade and stop talking about Farzad Bazoft"; and the editors of Today (David Montgomery) and the Daily Express (Sir Nicholas Lloyd) for persistently hostile coverage.

When news broke (a surprise to us) that Farzad had spent 12 months in jail as a young man for attempted robbery, it was splashed on the tabloid front pages and presented as if it was a more important fact than his execution, even providing some justification for it. The Mail on Sunday linked Farzad with Iraq's so-called "doom gun" project, using documents that were later shown to be forged.

The conduct of two Tory MPs was unforgivable. Even while Farzad's fate hung in the balance, Terry Dicks said that he "deserves to be hanged". Dicks, a hanger and flogger, was described by another MP as "living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can get elected to parliament". Rupert Allason, alias Nigel West, the thriller writer, told the world that Farzad was a spy, a claim that led several front pages. He had no evidence and indeed no such evidence exists. His claim was based soley on the fact that the name of an Israeli businessman had been listed inFarzad's address book, a contact that had in fact been given to him by me. Farzad's conduct in Baghdad, announcing his trip in advance to the Iraqi authorities and sharing the results with his fellow journalists, was hardly the stuff of espionage.

Ironically, Farzad Bazoft achieved his ambition of reaching the world's front pages. Sadly, his name was in the headline, not the byline. But his highly publicised death highlighted the evil of Saddam's regime in a way denied to the thousands of victims who died in silence. This doesn't soften our rage at the injustice meted out to a friend. But it does give added dignity and meaning to his death to know that it served as a terrible warning to the world.